Recapitulation: does the development of the individual mind repeat the mental history of the race?

G. Stanley Hall, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The soul has a history far longer than the individual who bears it. Each of us begins not as a blank page but as the heir of an immense ancestral past, and in growing up we climb again, stage by stage, the long stairway the race has climbed before us. The infant's clutching reflex, the boy's passion for collecting and for the wild, his cruelties and his fears — of high places, of deep water, of the dark, of strange men — are not the products of his little life; no child has met the saber-tooth, yet the fear is there, ready-made.

These are reminiscences, vestiges of adaptations our forefathers made across geological ages, surfacing on their appointed schedule in the growing child. This is what I mean by the genetic method and by recapitulation: that ontogeny repeats phylogeny in the mind as the embryologists showed it does in the body, and that to understand the child we must read in him the epochs of the race — the animal, the savage, the nomad, the settled tiller of the soil — each leaving its deposit in a stage of childhood.1 The child is the key to the race's past, and the race's past the key to the child.2345

Sources

  1. Amulets, charms, lucky stones, everything that we call by the familiar term of tnascot^ partakes of the nature of a fetich. Through some fancied potency not to be f oimd among its physical qualities it is believed to bring us good fortune." Recapitulation of the Race in the Child The old saying that parents live again in their children is no less true than that the child lives again the history of the race.
    Aspects of Child Life and Education
  2. We must go to school to the folk-soul, learn of criminals and defectives, animals, and in some sense go back to Aristotle in rebasing psychology on biology, and realize that we know the soul best when we can best write its history in the world, and that there are no finalities save formulae of development. The soul is thus still in the making, and we may hope for an indefinite further development.
    Adolescence Vol 1, pp. 12–13
  3. Our own soul is full in all its parts of faint hints, rudimentary; specters flitting for an instant at some moment of our individual life and then gone forever, dim and scarcely audible murmurs of a great and prolonged life, hot, intense, richly dight with incident and detail that is no more; a slight automatism, perhaps, being the sole relic of the most central experiences of many generations, a fleeting fancy all…
    Adolescence Vol 2, pp. 65–66
  4. Children thus in their incomplete stage of development are nearer the animals in some respects than they are to adults, and there is in this direction a rich but undiscovered silo of educational possibilities which heredity has stored up like the coal-measures, which when explored and utilized to its full extent will reveal pedagogic possibilities now undreamed of.
    Adolescence Vol 2, p. 222
  5. Rudimentary organs of the soul now suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to crop out in menacing forms later, would be developed in their season so that we should be immune to them in maturer years, on the principle of the Aristotelian catharsis for which PREFACE x" I have tried to suggest a far broader application than the Stagirite could see in his day.
    Adolescence Vol 1, p. 15

Where the argument is made

  • Adolescence (2 vols., 1904 — the systematic statement of genetic psychology)
  • Aspects of Child Life and Education (1907)
  • Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (1906)

How the argument was received

Recapitulation was the organizing theory of Hall's whole psychology and the foundation of the child-study and developmental movements, but as biology it collapsed within a generation of Adolescence. It required the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism), which Mendelian genetics and the Weismann barrier ruled out; and as psychology its stage-parallels between child and "savage" were untestable and shaped by the racial assumptions of the age. What survived, stripped of the racial- history content, is the more general and defensible idea that development proceeds through an ordered sequence of qualitatively distinct stages — an idea that reappears, on quite different foundations, in Freud, in Jung's phylogenetic unconscious, and above all in Piaget. Hall's specific doctrine is a discarded theory; the developmental frame it helped establish is permanent.